Can development happen one village at a time?

Will Uganda's political future be decided in the streets of Kampala (above)? Photograph: Douglas MacLellan

The Katine project is wrestling with the challenge of achieving local development and making progress sustainable. But is this really how change happens? Is it possible to create "islands of development" such as Katine without progress becoming hostage to broader economic and political change in Uganda?

Understanding and influencing change lies at the heart of development work, and yet it is often neglected. Development workers tend to cling to set assumptions about what triggers development - good projects, for example, or civil society mobilisation, or new technology. One place to look for guidance is history - what can we learn from the numerous development success stories of recent decades?

Look at Asian countries such as South Korea and China, or African states such as Botswana and Mauritius, and the answer is relatively obvious: success stories arise when effective states emerge. Effective states guarantee security and the rule of law, and can design and implement an effective strategy to ensure economic growth that creates jobs and benefits poor people.

But while effective states lie at the heart of economic take-off, development is about much more than that. People experience poverty as a denial of dignity and rights, and "active citizenship" is the second crucial element of development.

Active citizenship begins with "power within" - poor people becoming conscious of their rights, women refusing to accept that they should be beaten - or, in the words of Fred Golooba-Mutebi speaking about Katine, ending "the belief by ordinary people that services are a privilege and not a right." Once that internal constraint is broken, the floodgates open to poor people coming together to seek solutions, whether for themselves, or by pressuring the state.

How does Katine measure up to this model? The state, whether effective or not, is notable by its absence, as Madeleine Bunting noted when she wrote, with some anger, "the question that keeps coming back is: where is the state investment in Katine? Why isn't Kampala finding the money to drill a borehole for this community? President Yoweri Museveni gets £70m a year in UK aid alone, so how come so little of it has found its way to Katine?"

The design of the scheme seems to have learned from some of the failures of past development fads, such as "Integrated Rural Development" in the 1970s that largely ignored these wider issues. Amref's chief executive Jo Ensor stresses that if the people of Katine need a borehole, Amref will not just dig into the ground and install one, it will teach them how to demand a borehole. In a similar vein, Oxfam tries to ensure that local success (whether in promoting the education of girls among Vietnam's ethnic minorities, or access to credit for pastoralists in East Africa) is merely the first step in persuading the state to adopt and spread the approach at a much larger scale.

But is it enough? What role will Katine and its citizens play in the big changes to come in Uganda? Will the country's political future be decided in the streets and slums of the capital Kampala, rather than the neglected villages of the interior? That is certainly what Ugandan academics have told me. In which case, why are so few aid agencies working there?

Even in Katine, a focus on achieving lasting change might lead in new directions - supporting whatever citizens' organizations emerge there to link up with similar groups elsewhere in Uganda in order to jointly press state agencies to do their job. Or explicitly taking what has been learned in Katine and using it to lobby media and decision makers in Kampala.

The chattering classes of media, academics, church leaders, trade unions, civil servants, political parties, lawyers and government exist in every country - even the poorest - and are invariably central to the way decisions are made. What they learn about Katine, and how it changes their views, could be crucial to ensuring the success of the project.